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How do you like your music served?

Since I can remember I have been a fan of music, and I enjoyed having it played most of the time. I’ll save my post on my various forms of portable music players for another time but I wanted to write more about the delivery of music and the type of music that I now listen to.

For me it started out with the radio, and always listening to my favorite programming (top 8 at 8 ) when I was a kid. Then eventually I got the technology and money to change that, and now I was in a new realm – the cassette tape. This allowed me to not only listen, fast forward and rewind, but to record my favorite programming so I didn’t have to always be near the radio at 8 to hear the song I wanted.

Soon this moved to CDs and I signed up for one of those music club offers (Buy 2 CD’s get 4 FREE!) where you pay top dollar for the artists you want, and get to pick from the pile of free ones like Dan Fogelberg. CD’s went a long way, until my junior year in high school when the recordable CD drive came out for computers.

This opened up a whole new world of music possibilities, effectively allowing me to create my own mix tape but in CD form. This was the greatest thing since sliced bread, the only problem being I was limited to the collection that my friends and I had. Then came along my favorite software program of all time: Napster. And not the new Napster, the old-school-download-whatever-you-want-at-high-speeds-Napster. Now I was able to get all kinds of music with the click of a button thanks to the high bandwidth offered by Michigan State housing. The next coolest thing was to make CD’s, and date them, or write funny things on them. That way when I popped it in, I could say “yeah that song was cool back on Sept 29, 2001”.

Probably the next coolest thing in my timeline of music was make the MP3 disc, a CD that held music in its compressed MP3 format, so one disc could hold 10 times the songs as an audio CD. That only lasted so long, and the trend for the market was more toward standalone MP3 players that you could load your music directly on to. I finally bit the bullet and got an iPod and could then listen to music like never before. Except it was just like before, only a different player. I still made playlists titled “09.29.01” or “Chris Rock” that held music from either that week, or his various songs I managed to download.

Then I graduated college, moved to Ithaca, and became disconnected with the current music scene. I could no longer make my favorite playlists by date. I wasn’t connected to any sort of music hub, and didn’t have a reliable way to get songs that I liked. I refused to pay money for music that wasn’t very good anyway. Now I either had to be satisfied with my music library, or come up with a new way to keep what I listen to fresh. Podcasts were just what I needed. These are recordings that are available either through Apple’s iTunes store, or often on the website of whoever is doing the recording. I now listen to the following Podcasts, with many of them updating daily, or on the least weekly:

1. Pardon the Interruption (PTI)

2. The best of Mike and Mike

3. The Fantasy Football guys

4. Fantasy Focus

5. ESPNU – college basketball

6. The BS report by Bill Simmons

7. The Onion Radio News

8. Coolness Roundup

9. Coolness Lounge

10. NPR Science Friday

11. Club 538 – Tiesto’s clublife

I’m sure there are tons of other podcasts that I’d enjoy listening to, I either A) haven’t found them yet, or B) don’t have enough time in the day to check them all, so my least favorites will probably get skipped.